This application is related to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/227,377 entitled “Data-Center Network Architecture”, filed on Sep. 14, 2005, which is hereby incorporated by reference as if set forth in full in this application for all purposes.
This invention is related in general to networks and more specifically relates to data-center network architecture.
Data-center networks, called data centers, are employed in various demanding applications, including business, government, university networks. Such applications often demand readily available, reliable, and secure data centers for hosting critical applications and data storage facilities, such as servers and databases.
Highly available, redundant, and scalable data centers are particularly important in enterprise applications, where rapid network growth and network attacks are common. Unfortunately, existing data-center network designs often require tradeoffs between security capabilities, bandwidth, and scalability. Consequently, conventional data centers must often trade network security for reduced network bandwidth and availability, resulting in networks that are undesirably vulnerable to traffic bottlenecks.